Hello, my name is Looptron.

Late again.

Oli posts gig recaps almost instantly, but for some reason (heavy medication, excessive alcohol intake) I never get round to writing these things up. My advice? Read his post and I'll fill in the bit about Cassette Electrik (they woz awesome, innit? I liked the panicky encore bestest.), say thanks to Miss Rogers for being awesome and wish Synthetic night long and continued success. It has the makings of something rather special... I have every intention of going back as a punter. (Although not next month cos it clashes with Four Tet.)

In order to aid my recovery from the lurgy this weekend I did little more than play Gran Turismo. And eat. And met a really short guy called Noah. And started a remix (more on that later). And stuff.

Today my new toy turned up - a Korg MR-1 portable hard disk recorder. I shall attempt to record all gigs/happenings/interesting audio artefacts/squirrels from this point onwards....there will be a near Zappa level of archival from here on in. Prepared to be bored. :-)

Finally, happy birthday to Sally The Promo Bunny! God bless her and all who sail in her. It's my birthday on Saturday so we're gonna have a happening in Norff Lahndan. You're all invited.

This evenings performance is brought to you by...

Pass the penicillin.

It is, of course, entirely predictable that I should wake up two days before a gig with the glands in my neck swollen to the size of golf balls and a screaming sore throat. However, all is not lost because a) I'm not exactly a tremendous singer at the best of times so you'll probably not notice the difference and b) a certain Miss Sarah Rogers is gonna get up and help at the Synthetic launch night. We ran through Circus a couple of times yesterday to make sure we remembered it, plus a couple of acoustic things to perhaps deploy at mine and Sally the Promo Bunny's joint birthday bash (open mic... be afraid.... be very afraid) and then we went for a curry.

It's a hard life being a rock star.

I'm also considering buying some sort of reasonably specced portable digital recording device so I can start recording gigs and then agonising for days afterwards about all the teeny mistakes that no-one else heard. Also, it means I can start acquiring a "found sound" library to expand the palette a bit from the existing soft synths and sampled Rhodes approach.

Um.

That's it.

Off to locate medicinal compound. (Thanks Lily)

Looptron @ Synthetic, 27th March

Hey kids,

First things first - thanks very much to everyone who trekked to Norff London for the B&G gig last Saturday. I'm reliably informed I had a great night! Next stop, Souff London.

Due to various sinister machinations (far too complex to go into in a random bandspam such as this) I shall be carting the Looptron rig at short notice into Darkest Stockwell to open up at the launch of a new electro night called Synthetic in a couple of weeks time. I'm on early, literally 8pm, and that's not even the usual made up, "tell 'em half an hour early so they're definitely on time" stage time. That's actually when I'm on. You also get another three bands (one of whom looks suspiciously familiar) and lashings of electro disco to boot. As always, gory details below...

See you there,
Nx

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Thursday 27th March
Synthetic Launch Night
The Ballroom at The Cavendish Arms,
128 Hartington Road, London SW8 2HJ

myspace.com/syntheticnight
www.cavendisharmsstockwell.co.uk

£5 with flyer
Onstage 8pm sharp. Really mean it this time.

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[ www.looptron.com ]
[ myspace.com/looptron ]

A slightly delayed gig recap.

So it would appear the gig was a success and all the many lovely, lovely people who came along (thank you!) seemed to enjoy it. Myself, well I enjoyed it slightly less, but mainly cos I had a bit of a head cold, couldn't hear anything and got really dizzy and nearly fell over in the fourth song. It would seem that no-one noticed though. :-) In fact the feedback has all been really positive and has somewhat put aside my fears regarding making this stuff sound good live, and also taught me some important lessons regarding the nature and scale of venues I should be looking at to deploy this stuff in.

On top of that Clatter were awesomely good and lovely people to boot (although they have the most equipment of any two-piece band I've EVER seen), Toupé still can't actually get through a whole song without having to stop and laugh and The Goose were out deploying the first new material we've heard from them in some time. (There was talk of recordings also. Most exciting.) Young Master Oli (of Cassette Electrik fame) has posted a detailed account of things here. Also Young Master Marty (of Moeker fame) took some photos which I've linked on the Looptron Facebook group.

So...the beta test gig is out of the way, the distro for the EP is sorted, Sally the Promo Bunny is doing, er, promo things (including getting a large fake tattoo of the Looptron logo on her arse - don't ask).... I really, really, really must get round to booking a tour.

For those of you with processing cycles still to burn after all that heres an article about modelling music in multidimensional spaces in order to find commonality in compositions. Amazing stuff.

People are people.

I'll be wandering off shortly to see Cassette Electrik do their thing in the seedier part of Old London Town (and then perhaps they'll play some songs arf arf arf) but before I do a quick shout out to Laura at The Smiths' Occasional Blog for not only posting about the EP and posting some of the tracks but being so utterly, utterly lovely about everything. Meeting cool people is what makes this job so much fun....